Category Archives: Uncategorized

Well, no, I’m not going to start putting up here the really interesting gossip that people tell me. If I did so they’d stop telling me such things. The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has moved yet again. First … Continue reading →

John Baez is encouraging people to join in a campaign to “save New Scientist” from itself, i.e. to get them to stop publishing so much scientific nonsense. This seems to me like a worthwhile goal; maybe if they stop writing … Continue reading →

Frank Wilczek, besides his other accomplishments, is also the star of an opera, entitled Atom and Eve. More commentary on this from Betsy Devine, and Jennifer Ouellette, as well as a report here, and a review here. Paul Cook has … Continue reading →

Seems like everyone is getting a MySpace site, first Michio Kaku, now GLAST. There was a conference this past week in Madrid honoring Nigel Hitchin’s 60th birthday. The program is here. The latest issue of Nature has an article by … Continue reading →

There’s a big debate within the scientific community in general about how and whether to move away from the conventional model of scientific publishing (journals supported by subscriptions paid by libraries, only available to subscribers) to a model where access … Continue reading →

This week the Newton Institute in Cambridge is running (with funding from the Templeton Foundation) a workshop on the topic of Noncommutative Geometry and Physics: Fundamental Structure of Space and Time. The program is here, some of the talks are … Continue reading →

I’d really much rather ignore the activities of Lubos Motl, but his unethical behavior recently has sunk to new lows, and it seems necessary to point this out and encourage others to take appropriate action. When Lee Smolin’s new book … Continue reading →

Wired has an interview with Lee Smolin. The French internet site Arte has interviews with various physicists, including one with Carlo Rovelli. If you don’t want to watch the videos, there’s a text summary (in French). Mel Schwartz died earlier … Continue reading →

The American Institute of Mathematics was founded in 1994, with financing from John Fry, the Silicon Valley businessman responsible for Fry’s Electronics. The Fry’s store in Palo Alto is quite remarkable, containing everything a Silicon Valley geek might need, with … Continue reading →

The winners of the 2006 Fields Medals are Terence Tao and Grigori Perelman (as widely predicted), also Andrei Okounkov, and Wendelin Werner. For some more information, see the press releases at the ICM site. Okounkov’s mathematical work has been in … Continue reading →